Study on product automated setup planning in manufacturing

Setup planning is the critical tool in manufacturing which bridges gap between CAD and CAM. Setup planning affects significantly the quality and the overall cost in manufacturing. Although some setup planning subsystems have been integrated to state-of-the-art CAM system, CAM software tools can only handle some process planning tasks gracefully in a single setup, for part that need to be manufactured in multiple setups, critical decisions are usually made by expert machinist. In this paper, a automatic approach is presented to setup planning in manufacturing, the feature of part is defined as global feature, operational feature and same operational feature; then part is represented into a directed graph based on graph theory; at last, comprehensive principles are explored and summarized for setup planning. An example is illustrated to demonstrate these principles.